


Daughter Mine

by PocketFell



Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game)
Genre: A general sense of catharsis, Accidental Baby Acquisition, Baby Andromeda is a delight, F/M, Gen, General warning that Daneel considers killing Rommie, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Revenge, Seasons of Amarantia (D&D Campaign), She immediately disregards that as morally heinous though, Violence, healthy family relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-13
Updated: 2020-11-12
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:54:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27534835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PocketFell/pseuds/PocketFell
Summary: When Daneel finds her parents, she has a few expectations. Revenge, yes. Blood on her hands, definitely. The kid is a surprise though.
Kudos: 1





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Daneel takes a little trip, does some violence, realises she can't leave a toddler to fend for itself.

It’s almost unfair. That they got to live the life of comfort and safety in the centre of a coastal town and I got saddled with the job of fighting a Godkiller. Not that I begrudge my friends for taking me with them, but I would have given anything to simply _stop_ being a killer and disappear into the night. It’s funny, how things work out. The two people most determined to make me into what I am today are the two people who decided to escape it as soon as they could.

The house is brightly lit from within. A gap in the curtains reveals the warm orange glow of a roaring fire. They’ve gotten sloppy, it seems. Perhaps the comfort of suburbia has made them lax in their precautions. Certainly, they aren’t expecting _me_ , of all people. No. As far as my parents were concerned, I’d died at their hands after they ejected me from the program. I’d made sure of that. They’d taught me well, after all. If I’d been less of a coward, they might have even bothered to teach me more. Perhaps I wouldn’t be here for this.

Nervous fingers trace the beads of the bracelet on my left wrist and my thoughts drift to the eladrin who had given it to me to keep me safe. Safety: Yet another thing my parents had never considered.

I push the bitterness to one side. Really, this is all a delaying tactic. My heart is in my throat at the thought of what I’ve come here to do. To do to them. There’s only two ways I can foresee it ending and neither of them are particularly good for me. I’d made sure to say goodbye to everyone before I left, just in case.

I knock on the door. Four sharp, precise knocks, just like the passcode they taught us. It might not be enough to make them work it out. After all, I’m sure a lot of people knock like that. But perhaps it will make them wonder. There are several seconds of nothing before I hear the sound of footsteps approaching the door. They’re heavy, for a halfling, so probably my father. To my surprise, he swings the door open immediately, without even pausing to check who might be on the other side. There’s a peephole, so I know he could have. More fool him, I suppose.

Green painted wood swings inwards, revealing a face I never thought I’d live to see again. He looks only slightly older than when I last saw him. Clearly the last 7 years have been kind to him. Life is often like that to people who leave one of their children in the sewers for dead. That kind of cruel irony is something the Gods seem particularly fond of. There’s an almost careworn expression on his face that’s belied by the precise lines of his beard and the militaristic set to his body. The faded green of a cardigan—an honest to Gods cardigan—isn’t enough to disguise his toned form. Yes, he might have gotten careless, but he certainly hasn’t gotten lazy. He stares at me for several seconds with growing fear in his eyes.

Tilting my head slightly to one side, I smile coolly at him. It doesn’t reach my eyes. I’d had to go for lessons from Helena for that one, since according to her my smiles were “too genuine”.

“Hello, Father.”

All the blood drains from his face and he steps backwards into the house. I follow him step for step, pushing the door open with one hand. The other, I rest on the hilt of my sword, ready to draw at any moment.

“Surprised to see me? I can imagine you would be.”

He doesn’t reply, just retreats further into the house. There’s what looks to be a corridor adjoining the entrance hall and I assume he’s going to try for a weapon. I’m advancing past the stairs when I hear the first stirrings of other movement in the house. I freeze immediately, trying to work out the source of the noise.

“Who was that at the door, Maritus?”

My mother’s voice cuts through the silence, almost exactly as I remember it. Almost. This is the first time I’ve ever heard them refer to one another by name. Back in the Palaestra it had been exclusively ‘Trainer’. Of course, I hadn’t expected them to actually care for one another enough to stay together after the training had ended. I never saw anything particularly romantic in cult-directed couplings designed to produce genetically superior children.

Maritus takes his eyes off me for long enough to look up the stairs, indirectly telling me where the shout had come from. He glances back at me immediately, but I make no further mood toward him. I want to see this play out, and from my position at the bottom of the stairs I can undoubtedly see better than he can when the woman who gave birth to me appears on the landing.

My mother appears far calmer at my sudden, uninvited appearance than Maritus had. Barely a surprised raise of the eyebrow. She’d always been far more invested in the program than he had. Perhaps the assassin’s instincts had died a slower death in her than in him. There’s a small dagger, really more of a work knife, strapped to her thigh. It’s visible over the soft brown leather of her breeches. Her hand stretches out for it almost immediately before snapping back as she throws the knife in my direction.

I catch it, although I don’t need to. The blade would have gone wide anyway. But I’d learned how to do it from Derek and I wanted to get as much benefit out of knowing all these powerful people as I could.

It isn’t to no effect either. My mother pales, stepping backwards. Staring at her is like looking in a mirror, and the sight of her just makes me angry. All those times she’d kept going, past the point of my unconsciousness, or when she’d locked me in a pitch-black room and left me there for _days._ She’d done all that knowing that the face looking back at her was her own. The only difference between us was the eyes. Hers, an unremarkable, muddy brown. Mine a hazel so light it looked like gold when the sun hit them.

She doesn’t meet my gaze for long, turning almost immediately to the room beside her.

“Alemna, stay there, sweet one. There’s danger here.”

I snort laughter and turn to raise an eyebrow at my father. To his credit, the man simply cowers further away from me. He isn’t a complete idiot. Of all the times they could have chosen to respect my skills, now is probably the most satisfying.

And then the child appears. She draws all my attention immediately. Perhaps three years old, toddling on unsteady legs and everything that I never was. Where I took the dark skin and hair of my parents, this tiny halfling is the kind of pale that will undoubtedly grow to sun-kissed bronze as she ages. Her hair is curled into tight ringlets and so blonde that I can’t help but wondering if this is what Aneryin had looked like as a child. She stares at me with the kind of unconcerned expression I’ve learned is common in small children.

“So, you abandon me for dead because I’m not _strong_ enough for you and as soon as you’re out of jail you replace me with _this_?”

I want to be disgusted by the tiny child. _Want_ to want to put a knife in the girl’s throat and leave my parents to pick up the pieces of a life destroyed. That would probably hurt them more than my original plan ever could. I bite down on my lip in irritation. No. Much as I may want to punish me parents, this girl deserves mercy just as much as I had. And I wouldn’t be able to meet Jericho or Lorelei’s eyes knowing I had that blood on my hands.

Maritus takes my hesitation as his opportunity. That always _had_ been my weakness. An ‘overly developed sense of attachment’, they’d called it back then. Lorelei calls it having a soft heart.

It’s decidedly not soft hearted of me when I shove my mother’s dagger into his gut and _twist._ His moan of pain is shot through with a cough of blood and I can’t find it in me to feel bad. He’d done much the same thing to me when I was 16, but unlike me, he hadn’t finished the job. Hadn’t finished the second time either, when a group of his soldiers had been sent to poison me in the streets.

“You’re supposed to be dead.”

“Didn’t take. Sorry to disappoint. Again.”

I punctuate the last word with a shove and my father collapses against the door of his study, leaving a bloody, red smear behind him.

My mother isn’t doing much better. She’d ferried Alemna back into her nursery by the time I get up the stairs and gotten herself a sword from somewhere. I recognise the blade immediately. It was the same one she’d use while she was ‘training’ my siblings and I as children. There was a scar on my right leg from where she’d gotten a little too angry and a little too carried away.

Our blades meet with a clash of metal. The spectral energy that makes up my sword flashes brightly at the contact. From behind me, I hear a joyous peal of laughter, but for once I’m too focussed to pay attention to the emotions of my sword.

I’m at a disadvantage, fighting with my back to the staircase and my mother knows it. She pushes the attack every moment she gets but I meet her strike for strike. My skill with a blade had been the only reason they’d kept me in the Palaestra as long as they had. If they’d been able to stop me feeling, I’d have been elevated to the Coronat long before any of my siblings.

The thought fills me with rage and I choose that moment to make a risky attack, spurred on by the emotion. I swing my sword in a wide arc and my mother parries it with relative ease. It gives me enough room to get inside her guard. I press the dagger that she’d thrown at me to her throat, forcing her against the door to the nursery where my sister waited, unaware of the danger outside her sanctuary.

My mother, for the first time in her life, looks genuinely afraid of me. Pushing the dagger a little harder, I draw a drop of blood as she swallows.

“What is it you want, daughter mine? Revenge? Money?”

I growl deep in my throat and look up to stare at her.

“Offer them to me.”

“All that I have and more.”

I snort at the words. This comfortable life of safety was nothing to me. And revenge wasn’t out of my reach any more.

“I want my childhood back you _bitch._ ”

There’s no avoiding the splash of blood that follows. Still, I manage to wipe most of it off before I open the door to the nursery and cast a temporary illusion to cover the enormous stain on my shirt. Alemna is sitting in her crib, apparently uncaring of the events that just transpired outside her door.

It occurs to me that I could leave her here. Someone would eventually notice the open door, or the bloodied corpse in the hallway. They’d take Alemna and keep her somewhere safe.

The child in the crib stares up at me, wide eyed.

“Fuck.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Daneel announces the new resident of the Cartwright farm, and spends some time getting to know her new sister.

She obviously hadn’t belonged to my parents. Adopted, obviously. And there was no way I’d subject a child to the care of orphanages in Poncara when they’d gotten out once already. They weren’t bad, but there was never enough to go around and it made for a hard life. And no sibling of mine would have a hard life when I was living as well as I’d ever hoped I would.

I step away from the crib with a frustrated sigh and begin rooting through the drawers in the room. There’re clothes in several of them that I cram into a bag apparently for such purposes that had been left by the door. Swinging the bag over one shoulder, I make a detour into the other rooms on the floor searching for anything my parents had owned that might be valuable. Old habits die hard.

Returning to the child—to my sister—I grab her under one arm, holding her parallel to the ground so that she can’t wriggle out. It isn’t how I’ve seen other people carry babies, but Alemna seems calm enough that it will work for the moment.

With a free hand I draw the sending speaker from one of the pouches at my waist. I had one tuned to almost every member of the Odd Squad, and most of them answered reliably. I was hoping that Jericho or Lorelei would have theirs close to hand.

“Hey, Dad. I seem to have adopted a baby. Could use a hand if you’re not—Alemna stop WRIGGLING or I will put you in the bag of holding and leave you to suffocate you little- “

The Jericho on the other end of the line is silent for several seconds.

“When you say you adopted a baby do you mean like you found a kid on the street or like you stole a newborn from its parents?”

Labouring under my burdens, I survey the situation I’ve gotten myself into.

“Bit of both. Listen I’m gonna be ‘porting back in in a minute, can you meet me in my room?”

The teleportation circle for this town is in the middle of the square, so in the meantime I have to hope I can cross the busiest part of town without anyone noticing that the child I was carrying wasn’t technically mine. Hopefully my mother hadn’t made herself a socialite in the time since I last saw her.

I slip the sending speaker into my pouch once more and set off down the road toward the town centre. It isn’t a long walk, but Alemna is shuffling around a lot so in the end I settle for putting her on the ground and letting her walk. She seems to be quite good at it for someone so small, and content to hold my hand as we leave the house.

Surprisingly, the small girl doesn’t say anything about wanting to go back, and I wonder if that means something might be wrong. As more people start appearing in the streets around us, I grow more and more concerned as I realise the enormity of what I’ve done. I’ve stolen a lot of things in my career, but this is the first person. And if I’m stealing people, surely that makes me no better than some of the people I’d hated over the years?

“Puppy! Look! Wanna puppy.”

Almena draws my attention to a small stuffed dog in the window of a store. It’s sitting up and has long ears that reach almost to its feet. She’s completely enraptured by the toy, and as I try and pull her away from the window, she looks up at me and repeats her words.

“Wanna puppy.”

“I’m not entirely sure that is wise. We have places we need to be and I am trying to avoid attracting attention.”

“Puppy!”

Her bottom lip sticks out and she appears to be dangerously close to crying. Not wanting to cause a scene in the middle of my first kidnapping, I take my sister inside the shop and set her down on the floor. It’s a toy shop, from the looks of things, with a variety of items all around. There’s little wooden toys in baskets and artfully sewn stuffed animals on shelves. Alemna seems determined to get to the puppy she’d seen in the window and is already trying to climb into the display to get to it. I grasp her under one arm again, depositing her firmly on the side away from the window.

Taking her hand in mine, I lead her up to the counter. An aged human sits behind it on a high stool. She’s holding a small piece of wood in one hand and carving it into shape.

“Excuse me?”

My words draw the woman’s attention, and she smiles at me.

“What can I do for you, petal?”

“That dog in the window. My sister seems to be quite fond of it. I was wondering how much it was?”

“Oh, you’re after the dog? He’s quite pricey. It took a lot of work to get him together like that. One gold piece.”

The price shocks me. One gold is shockingly low compared to what I’m used to, but for a poor fishing village it’s probably something you’d save up for over the whole year. I set down twice the amount on the counter top. It was money taken from my mother’s purse anyway. She owed me this much.

“I’ll take it. And another gold, for all your fine work.”

The woman looks taken aback. She sets down the piece of wood and all but falls off her stool. This is probably more money than she was expecting to earn this month.

She recovers quickly enough and I track her with my eyes as she walks around to the window display. As she plucks the dog from the window, my eyes catch on a flash of yellow tucked into one of the baskets. Letting go of Alemna for a second, I dig the other animal out from the basket. It’s a duck, made with the same care and precision as the dog, but of a far simpler design. It’s round form instantly appeals to me and I hold it up to the woman.

“How much for this one?”

“After what you gave me? Take it. I’ve enough now to buy materials to get me through the winter and some to spare. Nay, girl. No charge for the duck. You seem taken enough with it for me to know it’s going to a good home with you.”

Although she must be at least 80 years old, the woman drops to her knees to put her eyes on a level with Alemna’s.

“And this one is for you, isn’t it?”

Alemna nods, sticking a thumb into her mouth. Very solemnly, the woman hands the toy over, and Alemna immediately begins rubbing the soft material of the ears over her mouth. She becomes much easier to deal with as her focus is now almost entirely dedicated to the small dog.

As we make our way through the town centre to the market square she talks endlessly of it, what she will name it, and all the adventures it had been on before it had come to be in the store.

I frown at the last one, informing her that the dog, as an inanimate object had been on no adventures since it could not move. She just rolls her eyes like I’ve told her the most idiotic thing she’d ever heard.

We attract a few stares as we cross the square, although that could be to do with the fact that I walk with such haste I almost trip over my own feet. Stepping into the circle I think hard of Wuster, holding Alemna in my arms so she doesn’t get lost on the journey.

When we reappear it’s on the border of the Cartwright farm and Jericho is waiting for me.

“I said to meet me in my room you know.”

“Yeah, but you told me you’d adopted a child, so I figured I’d have to do a little damage control.”

My adoptive father is wearing the same trademark grin that he’d specialised in back when we were adventuring together. Although there’s only a handful of years between us, he had always seemed much wiser than I had. And that was saying nothing of his wife. I had become very attached to him almost immediately.

Unfortunately for me, Alemna doesn’t seem to share the same sentiment. She hides behind my legs with the dog clasped tight to her chest and one thumb stuck in her mouth. I look down at the child and then back up at Jericho, then blow a breath of air out through my mouth.

“Okay. Long story short, I did what I set out to do but my parents had… acquired this kid. I wasn’t about to just LEAVE her there in some crappy seaside town so I took her with me. They were calling her Alemna.”

“Alemna?”

“Mhm. Not a huge fan of that one, actually. It’s Ancient Asnan for Foster Child, but then that’s just those two all over. Doesn’t seem like they’ve taught her to use a sword yet though, so she’s better off than I was at that age.”

Jericho sits down in the dirt, and leans around to meet eyes with Alemna. She ducks around the other side with a squeak and clings tightly to my legs.

I frown at the two of them, trying to work out what’s going on. Alemna is dangerously close to bumping her head on the bag that’s hanging over one of my shoulders and I’m so busy trying to shorten the strap that I don’t even notice Jericho introducing himself to Alemna.

She emerges from behind my legs, but keeps holding on to the dog.

“Well howdy Alemna. It’s wonderful to meet you. Would you like to go run around in the garden with me? Then Dani can go talk to some people without needing to worry about you.”

I smile at Jericho, who winks at me in return. Alemna seems to perk up visibly at the prospect of having space to run around. She nods vigorously at him; so, he takes her by the hand and leads her around the corner of the house.

Freed from the burden of the child from the time being, I take the moment to store the bag I’d acquired in my bedroom for the moment, and to strip off the outer layer I’d worn while ‘visiting’ my parents. From below me, I hear the sounds of childlike laughter. When I go to the window to take a look, Jericho is chasing Alemna around the garden and roaring like a dinosaur. I make a mental note to introduce her to Enzo at some point. She’d likely get along swimmingly with the affectionate lizard that the Velociraptor had become. I stand watching the two for some time. I hadn’t known Jericho while his children were Alemna’s age, but he was a natural with small children—just as he had been with me when _we_ first met.

Lorelei, I know, will be in town working the forge. It isn’t a long journey, but I pack some food in a piece of muslin and take it with me. She’ll undoubtedly turn down the wineskin, but I bring it anyway out of politeness. I find it is always wisest to bring gifts to a difficult conversation. Lorelei isn’t the type to leap to violence at difficult news, but I learned the hard way never to be too careful.

The walk into town is uneventful, and I lose myself in the tread of my boots on the dirt roads. The thin soles of my boots used to let me feel every intricacy of the buildings I was climbing. These days I far prefer the rocks and pebbles of the local roads. On the way in I pass a couple of the other farmers in the area on their way out of town. They still look at me with slight suspicion, and I’m sure the blood that likely still stains my undershirt is doing nothing to help my reputation as a stranger—and a strange person on top of that.

The clanging of Lorelei’s hammer on the town forge draws me like a moth to a candle. The cleric’s presence usually calms me, but apparently bringing a baby home is enough to make anyone nervous. My adoptive mother is working when I slip into the forge, so I settle into a perch on the table with her tools to watch until she gets a free moment. Warm from the fire, she has her sleeves rolled to the elbows and I can see beads of sweat dripping beneath the ponytail she has her hair secured in. All this effort when she could just as easily have used her magic to manipulate the metal into the shape she desired.

When she reaches for a pair of tongs, I hand them to her before she has to begin searching. The sudden appearance of the tool is enough to startle her into noticing my presence. She finishes the blade of the spade she’d been working for in record time, before turning to face me. Immediately, I become fascinated by a pebble on the floor of the forge. It is far easier than meeting her eyes.

“Daneel, what's wrong?”

I push the wrapped cheese toward her and start rubbing at Aneryin’s bracelet again.

“I may have done something impulsive.”

“Oh really? Something more impulsive than killing your birth parents.”

I resented that. I'd put a lot of effort into the plan with my parents. They had required it. There was simply no telling how prepared I'd have to be.

There’s an archness to Lorelei's tone that I recognise well. She used to use on the Pious' followers, to give them a final chance to repent before we smashed them to pieces. I don’t like her using it on me. I’d known all along that she wasn’t a fan of my intentions toward my parents, but I’d had a long history of disappointing people. What was one more along the way? Except this was different because I was stuck living with this one.

“Mmhm.”

I don’t elaborate further than that. Lorelei’s hand comes up to cup my chin, drawing my head up so she can meet my eyes. I look away almost immediately, although it pains me to take away the physical contact of her hands on my face.

Lorelei only raises a surprised eyebrow.

“Well if you won’t even look at me it must have been bad. You didn’t burn the town down, did you?”

I swallow. Better sooner than later or she’ll start talking about how worried she is for me.

“I—my parents had a child with them. It wasn’t theirs, or at least it didn’t look like either of them, or me, so I’m guessing it wasn’t there. Anyway, they were kinda dead and I didn’t know what to do with the baby- “

“Please tell me you didn’t kill it.”

“I didn’t kill it. But I couldn’t leave her there. So, I took her home with me. She’s kinda my sister, I wasn’t about to… to let her live a life of struggle. That’s not the kind of thing heroes do. She’s in the garden right now, playing.”

“Little one, is this why you’ve been avoiding eye contact? You thought I’d be angry that you did the right thing by this girl?”

I nod.

“That you’d be angry I brought a child home without asking.”

Lorelei hums for a moment, chewing on the bread I’d offered contemplatively.

“Well, it was certainly a surprise. But I already know you’re a wonderful sister, and I think you’ll do a good job raising this one. And, more importantly, it means Jared and I don’t have to choose whether we have another baby or not.”

“Takes away the fun part of that decision though.”

The joke, deadpan, escapes me before I think through the implications of my words.

Lorelei chokes on the bread and looks down at me with a smile.

“You better be speaking as my friend and not my adoptive daughter there.”

“If speaking as your friend gets me any more information, then I am absolutely speaking as your daughter.”

Lorelei chuckles, before patting me on the head.

“Go on little one. Get back home to your sister. I have some things to finish up here, I’ll meet the littler one later.”

I don’t know why the result of the conversation surprises me. Lorelei has never proven to be irrational or get angry without reason. Perhaps seeing the people who had trained me as a child had put me on edge. The instincts they had left me with would never truly leave, but I seemed to be far more nervous around my friends today than I ever had been before.

The journey home is much quicker, perhaps because I am not trying to delay an unpleasant conversation this time. I’m able to lose myself in the sensation of dirt roads under my feet for a time. I find my thoughts drifting to when I had first met the Odd Squad—an almost completely different set of people then—and been sent into the mountains. That had been a lot of walking. It was probably the last time Zelyth had let us do anything of the sort—and only then because there was no way horses could navigate the steep mountain paths.

My musing takes me to the gate to the Cartwright farm and the handmade sign that Jericho had erected there. The sight of it elicits a fond sigh and as I hop over the gate, I can’t help but smile to myself. I know it isn’t the first time today, but it _feels_ like it is for reasons I can’t quite articulate. Rather than bothering Jericho while he plays with his new adoptee I head into his kitchen again and set about cooking dinner. Zelyth and Aneryin had come back from one of their more recent travels with a recipe for something called pasta, made from flour and eggs. It had become a quick favourite with the family, and was one of the things I could prepare without too much danger. Lorelei would appreciate someone taking the job off her hands—especially if she’d been working all day.

Jericho pops his head inside roughly ten minutes after I set the water boiling.

“You makin dinner?”

“Yeah. Being helpful, yanno? I like to be helpful.”

“Just so long as you’re not doin this to apologise for being an inconvenience. Again.”

I glare at my adoptive father, something I’d only taken to doing in recent months. It seemed to make him extremely pleased every time I did it, so I did it perhaps more often than I otherwise would.

“Hey Dani, you might wanna wash up before dinner, no offence. Your shirt’s got a little—you know. And it’s probably not a stain you can explain to the girls.”

I look down at the white linen of my shirt, genuinely surprised to see the massive red stain, now fading to a hideous brown around the edges. No wonder the people of Wuster had been avoiding me to fervently. Sometime between slitting my mother’s throat and bringing news to my adoptive mother I’d forgotten about the blood. The shirt was almost certainly a write-off. It was a shame too. White was a colour I’d only recently started branching out in now that I no longer needed to get bloodstains out on a regular basis. The irony of the situation wasn’t lost on me.

“Thanks. Where’s ‘Lemna?”

“Sleepin in the barn. I think bein kidnapped kinda tuckered her out a little.”

He does have a point. I’ve been kidnapped before and it’s exhausting. I shrug.

“You wanna finish up here then, and I’ll go take a bath.”

Jericho nods and takes the kitchen knife from my hands to take over chopping the tomatoes for sauce.

The Gods would probably frown on me for using the divine power I’ve been granted to heat up bath water, but they’d probably do the same thing in this situation. My shirt is almost stuck to my front by the drying blood and as soon as I’m aware of that it’s all I can do not to get in fully clothed.

The water is warm enough to boil someone alive if they’re not careful, exactly how I like it. When I submerge my head it feels as if I’m stepping into the Elemental Plane of Fire, but in the best way. Heat seeps into my bones and muscles, relaxing aches I didn’t know I had. My mind is not so quick to relax. Thoughts about everything that had happened today swirl in my head, ones I’d pushed down to deal with at some unspecified ‘later’. Although I doubted anyone would follow the trail and find me here to arrest me for murder, there was always the possibility that the wrong questions might get asked and I’d end up having to do something I’d regret.

I come up for air with my hair dripping wet. Aneryin would probably say it doesn’t do anyone any good to dwell on things they can’t change, but Aneryin hadn’t just acquired a child.

With a growl of frustration, I get out of the bath. I’m much cleaner now and decidedly not covered in blood any more. All these thoughts aren’t helping me so I put them back in the ‘To deal with later’ box and get on with my life.

The new shirt I put on isn’t white. No sense in risking one twice in one day. Instead it’s one of dark blue with a pattern of stars. Zelyth had brought it back as a gift when they’d visited his hometown and the silk was far too nice to wear on an everyday basis. I kept it for the days when I needed something special to remind me to live in the moment. When I come downstairs, Lorelei is home again and calling the girls in from outside. Alemna is perched on her hip, looking extremely tiny in the large human’s arms.

I do my best to step noisily so that I don’t make her jump, but a quarter of a century of instinct is hard to turn off, as evidenced by her surprise when I step around her into the kitchen. I hold my hands out for Alemna who reaches eagerly back for me. It’s unexpected. Of all the people she has met today, I am the only one who has violently murdered anyone today and yet she seems perfectly at ease with me. With my hands wrapped around her, it’s easy to forget what else they have done.

Dinner itself is calm enough. Lorelei and Jericho explain the situation with Alemna to their girls, leaving me free to learn how three-year-olds eat. Very messily, is apparently the answer. Although I try valiantly to convince her to sit in her own chair, her tiny size means that’s impossible and so I settle for keeping her on my knee. Then it’s a battle to teach her how forks work, and in the end it’s simply easier to let her share mine.

From the little I hear; my adoptive sisters take the news of their second additional sister in as many years quite well. I suppose it’s less of a surprise to them than it was when I showed up with a past I wouldn’t tell them about and a sword they weren’t allowed to touch. Only one of those rules had changed, and it wasn’t the one that involved me telling children about everything that lurked in the darker shadows of the world.

Alemna, for her part, seems entirely willing to only make mess, and repeatedly rubs her hands into the bowl placed before her. For all that I attempt to keep her face clear, it doesn’t seem to make much difference the few times she fails to weasel away from my dampened cloth. I start to regret taking a bath before dinner, since it’s almost inevitable that I’ll be needing to bathe Alemna, and potentially even myself again after this. Unfortunately, spaghetti is a particularly messy meal and it was never going to end very well for me. Still, Zelyth would be proud that I managed to keep the shirt clean, and when I strip it off prior to bathing Allie I even remember to fold it into the cubby hole rather than tossing it in the corner of the room.

Unlike dinner, baths seem to be something that Alemna enjoys deeply. Getting the water to the right temperature seems to be a very delicate balance, but once Alemna is in she seems to take great enjoyment in it. She spends most of her time splashing water all around the bathroom that I promptly have to wipe up with a towel. I've done enough stupid things to incur the wrath of my adoptive mother today, leaving the floor of the bathroom soaking is something I don't want to add to the list. Although Lorelei has never given me reason to believe that she’d do anything to hurt me, the thought of my Mother’s face is enough to make me nervous and edgy around the emotions of others for the moment. 

Once the water starts getting cold, I realise that not only do I have to dry my sister off, I also need to find somewhere for her to sleep. Then I need to get her to sleep. _Then_ after that happens, tomorrow will happen, and every day after that. And I'll have to spend all of them dealing with a toddler I stole in a fit of conscience. It's possible that this wasn't my smartest plan, in hindsight. 


End file.
